


The Boy Fell

by PresquePommes



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Surreal, Surreal Modern
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-19
Updated: 2014-07-19
Packaged: 2018-02-09 12:21:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1982823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PresquePommes/pseuds/PresquePommes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>...and did not get up again.</i>
</p><p>He didn't know how the story ended. </p><p>He needed to write the rest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boy Fell

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in a fit of madness.
> 
> I am still perplexed by it.

He brushed his fingers over the glossy cover of the book with a strange feeling of near-regret.

He’d told his publisher that he’d forgotten about the story- it had been one of his firsts, something he’d written before he’d been told in no uncertain terms that he was simply not made to be a children’s author.

Contrary to popular belief, he liked kids.

He just wasn’t sure how to talk to them.

Or write for them, apparently.

 _Fell_ was too dark for children, they’d told him. Too frightening. A strange little story about a six-year-old boy falling from his home in the clouds into the deceptive gloom of an empty forest, a story about a boy trying to find his way back again, completely alone, would give them nightmares, they’d said.

Maybe if he had an animal companion, they’d said.

Maybe if he climbed down the trees to the Earth to save his little sister, they’d said.

He’d stopped trying to get _Fell_ published after that. He had been, and still was, attached to it in a way he rarely became attached to his own stories.

He didn’t want to change it.

He’d even tried to illustrate it himself despite his lack of skill- the images had been so vivid, so real in his mind that he’d found himself frustrated with his inability to communicate the weight of their atmosphere through words alone.

Even now, more than a decade and a half later, he could still be just outside of that place, almost but not quite there, when he closed his eyes.

He could smell the faint mustiness of decomposing leaves, taste the sharpness of crushed pine needles in his sinuses.

He could see the broken patches of light dappling the forest floor, shifting with the swaying of the leaves they shone through.

He could feel the stickiness of the lingering late-summer humidity, relished the odd, coquettish gust of wind cooling the sweat on his face.

He could hear the crickets and the squirrels, the whisper of the wind against branches and tree trunks, the distant crackle of animals stepping through the underbrush, the rough calling of crows perched far above his head.

And the boy was still there, eyes bright and liquid even in the half-light, hair a twig-filled nest of sun-bleached brown.

Fearless, even in the loneliest place, even without a plan or a clue.

He’d never given him a name. The anonymity of the quiet forest and its silent world had seemed sacred- like the trees and the birds and ferny undergrowth were nameless, so too was the boy.

He’d always been _the boy_ \- just _the boy_.

His attempts at illustration had culminated in a single picture- effort alone had afforded him something that was almost what he’d envisioned, but could never be perfect for his lack of skill.

A smudged charcoal image of a little boy staring fearlessly upwards at an impossibly distant sky, hands clenched at his sides. He could still remember the frustration the process had caused him. The pain.

The _mess_.

He’d looked up from his fervour to find his hands black almost to the elbows. He still had no idea how it had happened.

He knew how this had happened, though.

They’d finally printed _Fell_ , but only because he was someone now. He hadn’t been someone then.

Now that he was someone, they were eager for more, had asked him for something older, something from before he was a someone, something for his readers to devour and compare to his newer works. He’d hesitated, because _this_ something was precious to him in a strange way, but ultimately, he’d given in.

He’d written _Fell_ to be read, and a part of him craved confirmation that it did not need to be changed.

They’d printed it with his clumsy drawing on the cover, and he found himself tracing his fingertips numbly over the line of the boy’s cheek with a feeling he lacked both the language and the self-awareness to define.

If they had asked him, he would have called it poignant, nostalgic, wistful, but only if he’d felt inclined to answer, which he would not have.

They did not ask, because they were not there.

He was alone in a different kind of forest.

So instead, he just looked down at the first printing of _Fell_ where it rested in his hands, feeling all of those feelings and more, and in the too-still late afternoon heat of his rooftop apartment, only a trickle of a breeze wandering in his kitchen window, lights off and tea steeping, herbal and grassy below his nose, he was almost there, closer than ever to standing in that forest with that boy who fell into a dark place and was not afraid.

He wondered, more than anyone else, if that boy had ever made it home.

He had not written the boy as finding his way home.

He’d intended his story to be a series.

First, the dark forest, crowded, but not with company.

Second, the bright expanses of the plains, figures shifting on the horizon like mirages, glimpsed but never seen.

Third, the glittering endlessness of the ocean, dark shapes moving far, far below, but never breaking the surface.

The fourth was the one he’d always looked forward to with both interest and a sense of vague apprehension, because his mind saw a jungle of concrete and glass, towering buildings and empty streets, silhouettes flitting behind darkened windows, pigeons cooing unseen on rooftops.

He saw a long, unlined road rolling up towards the city from between seamless eternities of golden cornfield, a multitude of crows calling from the power lines, heat radiating from the asphalt with the opalescent shimmer of an oil spill.

He wondered about the boy he saw walking up it.

He wondered about his bare feet on the hot blacktop.

He wondered about his sun-browned face, about his bright eyes raised in wonder to the very tops of the reaching fingers of that city skyline.

He thought about the boy.

He’d never figured out what happened next.

He closed his eyes and set the book on the table carefully, breathing in a sharpness that told him he’d been lost in his thoughts for too long- his tea had grown pungent and bitter while he’d left it steeping.

He drank it all without reservations, peering down into the dark wash of tannins at the sodden tea leaves gathered in the bottom of his cup when it was empty.

Even if he thought, for just a moment, that the parting in the leaves looked like a road cutting through a land of untended cornfields, he knew he saw nothing.

Levi was not a superstitious man- superstition required a faith in the fantastical he’d lost a long time ago.

But he did think, for the first time in nearly as long,

_‘I should write the rest,’_

because he still wondered about the boy, and he, more than anyone, wanted to know what happened next.

***

 _“You’re supposed to be writing a prequel to The Undertaker, I thought we’d discussed this,”_ his editor protested, voice coming through the speaker as tinny and hollow as a dollar store wind chime.

He hummed, only half-listening, and wiped his hair out of his eyes with the side of his hand, for once not thinking of the streak of charcoal he would find streaking his face when he was done.

He hated the stuff. It was messy, unreliable, and the only medium he’d ever been able to work with to any degree of success.

There was something about its very messiness, about the malleability of the lines it left on paper that suited the blurred, dreamlike images he occasionally found himself trying to reproduce.

He didn’t like art- it was too much effort for too little payoff, and he grew frustrated with it too quickly to even think of working to improve.

He’d started writing because his mouth did not move in the ways he wanted it to- because even his best efforts always came out strange, because the words that tumbled from his lips more than alienated him, they made him something he was not- in speaking, he was always misunderstood. In writing, he had the time and the space to gather his thoughts, to speak without interruption, to take back his words when he misspoke and never have them be heard.

He’d started writing because it was a medium that allowed him the intimacy of communication without the complications of direct contact with other people.

He was not an especially social person, but he did not like to feel alone.

He wrote now, he supposed, for the same reason, and because it had become so natural to him that the act was soothing, cathartic, rhythmic and smooth. It took him to a different place, a place with people who he could not misunderstand, for no one understood them better, and by whom he could not be misunderstood, for he was not a person in the same sense that they were- just someone who spoke the words that shaped them into being. Writing was timeless- he often found himself looking down at noon and looking up at midnight, unmoved and unchanged until he stood, suddenly hungry and exhausted and desperately in need of a bathroom.

Charcoal was a strange thing, because when he clasped between his fingers in a moment when his mind had gone a little sideways in just the right sort of way, it, too, could be timeless.

His phone was still speaking urgently at him beside the expanse of paper he had spread out on the hardwood of the living room floor.

He’d answered it out of reflex. There were black fingerprints on the screen. Later, they would infuriate him, but not now.

He was barely aware it was there at all. The words trickling out of its speaker were less real to him than the caws of the crows on the power lines or the rustling of the corn.

It seemed like he couldn’t get the blacktop black enough, but then, when it was, the edges of it were too sharp, and he had to smudge them out with his forearm.

And then the blacktop wasn’t black enough. It needed to be matte, so black he could feel the heat radiating off of it.

 _“Levi,”_ his editor scolded, _“are you even listening to me?”_

“No,” he mumbled vaguely, moving from the blacktop to pulling the coal across the paper in careful, endlessly repetitive motions. The corn had gone gold in the heat of autumn. Dropped ears littered the rows like so many heavy stones.

Leaves brittle, thin, so dry they’d began to curl at the tips and ruffle at the edges.

Stalks shrunken, hollow. The eddying breeze sent them rustling against each other for acres.

They sounded like rain heard from the safety of shelter.

_“Do you even have any intention of writing that prequel?”_

He barely registered the tinny question.

“Not really,” he murmured, smudging the stalks into their own shadows and carefully redrawing them.

_“What the hell are you planning on writing, then? Don’t tell me you’re taking a hiatus- you’ll lose your audience if you do that. ”_

“The rest of it,” he mumbled, closing his eyes and seeing colour overlaying the greyscale of the paper. “I need to know how it ends.”

 _“How what ends?”_ The pause crackled like radio static. _“Do you mean Fell? You don’t have any other incomplete works. I thought you’d said it had been too long since you’d written the first one.”_

He looked down and saw that they boy was looking over his shoulder at him.

He hadn’t meant to draw it that way- he was supposed to be looking up at the city.

He wasn’t sure why or even when he’d drawn it that way.

“I need to write the rest of it,” he mumbled again, and the boy stared at him.

His eyes were fearless, the eyes of someone who was not looking back out of indecision, but simply to question why the looked-upon wasn’t keeping up.

 _Hurry up_ , _old man,_ they said impatiently, _at this rate, you’ll be dead before I get there._

***

“You’ve been more withdrawn than usual, lately.”

He looked up from his plate with an unconscious frown.

Erwin sighed. “When was the last time you left the apartment?” he asked seriously.

“I’m out of the apartment right now,” Levi objected, frown deepening as he tried to maintain eye contact without lapsing into vacant staring. He was having trouble turning his thoughts outwards.

He’d been thinking about the boy.

“Before today,” Erwin prompted gently.

“I went grocery shopping on Wednesday,” he recalled, and looked back down at his plate. The strips of steak he’d cut looked like the logs of a raft to his unfocused eyes. Gravy seemed to lap around them like gently cresting waves.

He wanted to write.

“And which Wednesday might that have been?”

He wasn’t sure, so he didn’t answer.

Erwin was quiet for a little longer, hands maneuvering his utensils neatly through his dinner in precise, surgical motions. Levi watched them and thought about the boy.

He wondered how the boy ate. He’d never considered that.

He’d considered how he slept, how his face looked when he was dreaming, but never how his hands moved when he ate.

“Levi, are you still interesting in having _Fell_ illustrated?”

That was enough to draw him out of his musing. He met Erwin’s eyes and almost didn’t think of the ocean again, though the gold of his hair still brought images of the cornfield to his mind.

“Huh?”

“I remember when you first wrote it,” Erwin clarified, smiling mysteriously at Levi’s distant look. “You said you’d like to have it illustrated. Do you still want to?”

He blinked, slowly at first, and then with more focus. “I said I’d like if I could illustrate it, not that I wanted to hire an illustrator,” he corrected. “I don’t know who you were thinking of suggesting, but they won’t be able to do it right.” He wrinkled his nose without really meaning to. “It’d drive me nuts.”

Erwin’s laugh was the slow rumble of a distant barge, but he was too focused now to slip back into the dreamlike world he’d been inhabiting before.

“Here,” was all Erwin said, passing him his tablet.

He looked down at the screen and plunged back into himself so quickly he didn’t hear the hiss he drew in through his teeth.

He could feel the sun warning his hair, drawing a line of sweat along the bridge of his nose. The grass was both soft and hard underfoot, a darker green, browning at the tips, flushed with colour from a long, wet summer that was fading into a dry fall.

The sparse clouds were like paint strokes in the sky- too high in the atmosphere for the cotton ball curves he was accustomed to seeing hanging low above him, just icy trickles of white against afternoon blue.

He flicked to the next painting almost accidentally.

Storm clouds, a zigzag of lightening burning blazes of white through the knotholes of a hollow tree. He could smell the ozone. He blinked, half-expecting light spots on his retinas.

He flipped to the next.

The next.

The next.

Erwin’s chuckle crashed over him like a wave.

“Who is this?” he demanded, ignoring Erwin’s knowing smile.

“His information is all there on the website, Levi.”

He scrolled down hastily, eyes catching on the numbers in the blurb below the image before the name.

His eyebrows shot up.

“It took him almost a week to paint this,” he said incredulously, scrolling up to look at it and down again. “Who spends that many hours on a single painting? That sort of perfectionism might be a problem,” he muttered, feeling disappointment tug at the corner of his lips.

“He’s not a perfectionist,” Erwin commented. “He’s just slow. From what I’ve heard, it seems that his talent lies primarily in his work ethic- he’s improved by leaps and bounds through sheer effort alone.”

Levi eyed him warily from under his eyelashes. “He’s good,” he said cautiously, waiting for whatever Erwin had been holding back.

“He approached me,” he said quite casually. “It seems he’s been trying to contact you since _Fell_ ’s publication.” His smile turned a little wan. “You have a fan.”

“I have a lot of fans,” he dismissed, distracted by the similarly surreal time the artist seemed to have put into each of his works. “Where does he find the time to do any of this? He can’t have another job,” he muttered.

“He’s read everything you’ve ever written, hunted down every interview you’ve ever done, and, when it turned out that you didn’t have any sort of publicly available address for fan mail and cannot be contacted through your publisher, managed to track me down from a single mention you made in an interview five years ago,” Erwin said drily.

Levi looked at him with no small measure of alarm.

“After _Kings Behead The Kind_ was published, you told an interviewer that you’d once written a children’s novel and wished you were a better artist so you could illustrate it yourself,” he explained. Levi continued staring. Erwin’s smile deepened, revealing a rare dimple. “A friend of his put it together that the book in question was _Fell_ , and he’s been determined that he’s going to be your artist ever since. In the last month alone, he’s produced six reproductions of your original drawing.”

Levi put down the tablet very slowly. “How do you know that?” He glanced at it warily. “I didn’t see anything like that on his website.”

“He told me,” Erwin clarified.

“Did you-”

“No,” he laughed, and all at once Levi realized that he looked a little haggard, at least as much he ever did. “I haven’t responded to a single e-mail, but he keeps sending me them regardless. The reproductions aren’t on there because he doesn’t think they’re good enough.”

“Are they?” he asked warily.

Erwin quirked a heavy eyebrow. “I don’t know. He hasn’t volunteered to show them to me. Given that I haven’t responded, it’s not as though I could have asked him to.”

Levi caught himself weighing the possibility that the artist in question was dangerously obsessed with him against the lingering smell of ozone the image of that lightning strike evoked in him. He could still taste it in his sinuses when he breathed in through his nose.

Erwin had slid the tablet back towards himself and was tapping away on its surface nonchalantly.

“I’m curious,” Levi said finally.

“Good,” Erwin responded without looking up, “because I’ve just agreed to meet him.”

Far more sinister things swam just beneath the frozen veneer of his beautiful smile than did in the whole of the depths of the ocean in Levi’s mind.

“Let’s meet Eren Jaeger. How does Sunday sound?”

***

He was surprised to learn the kid lived in the city right up until he realized that the nameplate beside his apartment door hadn’t been changed because of how recently the new tenant had moved in.

“Erwin, I’m starting to think this shithead moved here just to bother me,” he mumbled, eying it uncomfortably.

“No,” Erwin said cheerfully, and Levi relaxed until he added, “he moved here to bother me. You just happen to live in the same city as I do, much to his good fortune.”

He curled his lip apprehensively, drawing his hand back from the door he’d been about to knock on.

“You know what, I’m changing my mind. Let’s get the fuck out of here before he-”

The door swung open and he tensed, but the person gazing down at him was a young woman, not a man.

She was beautiful in the way a marble figure was beautiful- a piece of breathing art lovingly hewn from stone to lifelike humanity. To him, she was made soft by clean, flowing lines that belied her true nature, not the reverse.

Her flesh looked to his eyes as though it would yield if he pressed a thumb against it, like it would be warm and imperfect to touch, but his mind whispered insistently that this simply was not true.

“Who are you?” she asked quietly, and sounded much like the statue he took her for.

Behind her, a head of straw blond hair tilted to peer at them through the gaps left between the door frame and her deceptively supple figure.

Blue eyes settled on him.

“That’s him,” a young man’s voice whispered conspiratorially, and the head drew back into her shadow. “Mikasa, I don’t think Eren knows-”

Her eyes flickered down from Erwin’s face to his own and stayed there. After a long moment, she shrugged and closed them, bustling forward through the door with her chin tucked in a scarf it was much too warm for her to be wearing, though red was a handsome colour on her.

“It’s what he wanted,” she said tonelessly, expression sliding from guarded to indifferent. “Let’s go.”

Her absence revealed a young man about half a head shorter than she was. He stared after her with a bemused look. “You don’t think we should warn him?”

She just shrugged again, saying nothing.

Beside him, Erwin broke the silence with a soft chuckle. “I take it you’re his sister?” he asked politely, and her forehead wrinkled suspiciously before she nodded curtly.

It was the blond who spoke, smiling with a sort of reflexive ease that he’d known Erwin too long to mistake for anything but practiced. “This is Mikasa. I’m Armin,” he introduced, extending a hand. “We’ve been helping Eren with the move.”

Erwin took his hand after Levi stared at it for an uncomfortably long moment.

“Erwin Smith,” he smiled, fishing out a business card with his free hand, “ _Smith and Associates._ We offer legal consultations and representation on both a private and corporate level. Am I wrong in thinking you’re Armin Arlert, graduate of _Reiss & Myers Law School?”_

He was not wrong, and everyone in the room knew it, even Levi, who was the least informed on the matter. He knew exactly who Armin was, and judging by Armin’s answering smile, Armin knew exactly who he was, in turn.

Levi tuned out their probing, political flirtations and turned his eyes on the artist’s sister again.

He tried to picture what her brother would look like- thinner, he imagined, and more sallow for the amount of time he spent painting indoors. She had a well-trained body and smooth skin that spoke of general robustness. She seemed more the type to achieve everything she thought to with an effortless, inhuman grace that shamed the diligence of the stubborn but untalented.

He wondered if she’d gotten the better genes of the two.

“You’re shorter than I expected,” she told him frankly.

He just looked at her.

“-in any case, we really should be going,” Erwin cut in, a hand falling on Levi’s shoulder to jar him from his reverie. “I did say I’d be here at two.”

Mikasa shrugged. “He won’t notice even if you’re an hour late,” she commented. “That’s why he told you to meet him here- he’s painting. Eren doesn’t stop painting for anything-” The look she settled on Levi was unexpressive, but still managed to be appraising. “-or anyone he doesn’t consider important.”

He wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

On one hand, it was a testament to the artist’s dedication.

On the other, he was not absentminded enough to fail to consider, with some unease, that he must have put down his brush for not insignificant periods at a time to track Levi down as he had.

He was almost flattered.

He was more unnerved.

Mikasa was still looking at him.

“He’s in the studio. First door on the left,” she told him, and then turned away, walking with unhurried strides towards the elevators. Beside her, Armin snuck one look back.

Erwin’s satisfaction was palpable. He chose not to comment on it for exactly that reason.

He led the way into the apartment out of a mixture of impatience and a desire to be done with the task at hand.

The doorknob to the studio door was paint-streaked, and he grimaced when he saw it, turning it with his sleeve. It swung open silently, skimming over a low, plastic-covered floor composed of thin slats of what looked to be soft wood- he suspected they’d torn out the carpet and simply covered what was underneath instead of replacing it.

The canvas the artist was working on was massive- a sprawling sheet of forest floor and half-formed tree trunks, the still-vague figure of a little boy imposingly huge within it, obscured only by the figure hunched halfway up a small ladder.

He could taste pine needles when he looked at it.

Erwin stepped into the room first, the plastic over the floor breaking the silence as it crinkled under foot.

The artist drew his brush back from the painting with a jerk, pausing for a moment.

He was paint-stained, which Levi had expected, and broad-shouldered, which Levi had not.

His hair was brown, and a wholly different texture than his sister’s, which Levi had not expected at all. The skin he could see peeking out from under the paint on his forearms was rich and bronze in a way that did not make logical sense when he considered his sister’s complexion.

After a moment spent looking at his painting in silence, still perched halfway up his ladder, the artist turned to look over his shoulder.

He was smiling.

“Sorry, I was just-” he started, and then caught sight of Levi, fumbling his paintbrush. It dropped with a clatter to the floor. “Oh my god.”

Levi barely noticed his reaction.

The boy was much older than he’d ever thought of him being, but he was still, unmistakeably, the boy.

***

He tried not to look at him.

His too-bright eyes and fiery personality confused him.

He knew, logically, that this was not the boy, but at the same time, he knew that this was.

It was giving him a headache.

He stared at his chest quite fixatedly, lips pressed into a thin line.

“-reminds me of when I lived in-”

The fact that the boy who was not the boy had been travelling the world quite literally up until he’d found himself so taken by Levi’s oldest and latest work, choosing to launch into excited narratives about the places he’d been and the things that he’d seen, did not help his confusion.

The fact that he’d stopped painting as soon as they’d arrived only worsened his apprehension.

“-acres of just trees, it was really kind of nostalgic for me,” he was saying as Mikasa padded quietly into the room.

“Are you talking about when you got lost in the Briggsdown reserve forest?” she asked, and Eren crowed in objection. “You talk about that like you didn’t almost die, Eren.”

“I didn’t die, I was fine,” he protested.

“You were alone for twelve hours with no food or water.”

“I was fine!” he repeated vehemently. “I was ten or something, I could take care of myself. Besides, you weren’t even there, we didn’t even know each other back then.”

“You were six,” she recited with the mechanical tone of someone who had argued about this particular subject and other subjects like it far too many times. “Your mom told me.”

Levi frowned. “How old are you?” he asked, and immediately regretted it. It was instinct that led him to meet the artist’s eyes, but he couldn’t make himself see anything but the eyes of the boy when he looked at them.

Eren’s face lit up when he realized that Levi had finally addressed him. “Twenty-three!” he said eagerly. “I would’ve been six around the time you were writing _Fell_ , isn’t that funny?” he laughed.

It was funny, but not in the way Eren seemed to think it was.

“Oh,” he said, and nothing else.

Levi hunched into himself defensively. He knew Erwin was noticing that his behaviour was even stranger than was typical, but he couldn’t bring himself to stop.

He didn’t like the puzzled little smile Erwin was sending him.

It unnerved him to think that even he didn’t know what was going on- it made the whole thing feel somehow even stranger, and the stranger things felt, the more he wanted to ask,

_“But how does it end?”_

***

After a week or so, he’d gotten used to Eren enough to tolerate looking at him, and Eren greeted this development with nothing but wholehearted delight.

He was passionate in a way that could alienate him, Levi supposed, talkative and unabashedly impatient for approval.

He was a lot of things, this boy who was not the boy, and Levi found he didn’t hate those things, even if they confused him.

He’d learned to tune out the unsettling moments in which Eren described things in oddly childlike terms- endless fields that met the skyline before they met a single tree or building, broad lakes that extended in every direction until the sight of land was nothing but a thought, forests with trees as broad and tall as a grain silo- but the images persisted in his mind nonetheless.

He felt, at moments, like Eren was looking at the world like the boy had looked at his.

For all his travelling, Eren’s world was still a big, big place, filled with mystery and adventure, and of all things, he had chosen Levi’s world as the one that was meaningful enough to give up those open spaces for.

He seemed happy enough in his small apartment, but Levi caught him gazing wistfully at the distant skyline sometimes.

One day, he discovered why.

“What?” he’d asked, nonplussed.

“Do you want to go for a drive?” Eren had repeated eagerly.

He hadn’t, really, but they did anyway.

Eren found the city streets just as fascinating as the rest of the world- he gawked and babbled and laughed and got both of them irretrievably lost while Levi wasn’t paying attention. They spent the next half hour poring over a map, Eren smiling sunnily while being utterly useless, Levi doing his best to ignore the way Eren’s bouncing knee kept bumping into his thigh.

They found themselves and then got themselves lost again, this time on purpose, though for what purpose, Levi could not decide.

The evening grew long and the short again as the night rolled in, dotting the streets with orange circles of lamplight.

After an hour, the bustle calmed to pulse, and then to a trickle.

After three, the streets were empty in the part of town they found themselves in, and Levi sat on the hood of his car, watching silhouettes flit behind darkened windows, listening to pigeons coo unseen on rooftops.

In a fit of dreamlike detachment, he found himself speaking.

“I don’t know how to get him home,” he admitted. “I don’t know how it ends.”

Beside him, Eren just looked at him, visibly surprised, and he braced himself for the inevitability of his disappointment.

“Why would he want to go home?” Eren asked him, eyes still bright and liquid in the half-light.

Levi stared at him.

“Why wouldn’t he?” he retorted, furrowing his eyebrows when Eren smiled.

“Why would he?” Eren asked again.

He opened his mouth to question Eren’s logic.

Eren closed with it with his own, and he supposed that was answer enough.


End file.
